Fire Watch

by Connie Willis

  “Yes,” she said.

  He untwined their fingers and rose from the couch. He walked through the crowd in the blue living room and went out the door into the snow. She did not try to go to her room. She watched them all, the strangers in their endless, random movement, her brother walking while he read, her grandmother standing on a chair, and the memory came quite easily and without pain.

  “You wanna see something?” her brother asked.

  Daisy was looking out the window. All day long the lights had been flickering, even though it was calm and silent outside. Their grandmother had gone to town to see if the fabric for the curtains had come in. Daisy did not answer him.

  He shoved the book in front of her face. “That’s a prominence,” he said. The pictures were in black and white, like old-fashioned snapshots, only under them instead of her mother’s scrawled white ink, it said, “High Altitude Observatory, Boulder, Colorado.”

  “That’s an eruption of hot gas hundreds of thousands of feet high.”

  “No,” Daisy said, taking the book into her own lap. “That’s my golden hoop. I saw it in my dream.”

  She turned the page.

  David leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That was the big eruption in 1946 when it first started to go wrong only they didn’t know it yet. It weighed a billion tons. The gas went out a million miles.”

  Daisy held the book like a snapshot of a loved one.

  “It just went bash, and knocked all this gas out into space. There were all kinds of—”

  “It’s my golden bear,” she said. The great paw of flame reached lazily out from the suns black surface in the picture, the wild silky paw of flaming gas.

  “This is the stuff you’ve been dreaming?” her brother asked. “This is the stuff you’ve been telling me about?” His voice went higher and higher. “I thought you said the dreams were nice.”

  “They were,” Daisy said.

  He pulled the book away from her and flipped angrily through the pages to a colored diagram on a black ground. It showed a glowing red ball with concentric circles drawn inside it. “There,” he said, shoving it at Daisy. “That’s what’s going to happen to us.” He jabbed angrily at one of the circles inside the red ball. “That’s us. That’s us! Inside the sun! Dream about that, why don’t you?”

  He slammed the book shut.

  “But we’ll all be dead, so it won’t matter,” Daisy said. “It won’t hurt. We won’t remember anything.”

  “That’s what you think! You think you know everything. Well, you don’t know what anything is. I read a book about it, and you know what it said? They don’t even know what memory is. They think maybe it isn’t even in the brain cells. That it’s in the atoms somewhere, and even if we’re blown apart, that memory stays. What if we do get burned by the sun and we still remember? What if we go on burning and burning and remembering and remembering forever?”

  Daisy said quietly, “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t hurt us.” There had been no fear as she stood digging her toes into the sand and looking up at him, only wonder. “He—”

  “You’re crazy!” her brother shouted. “You know that? You’re crazy. You talk about him like he’s your boyfriend or something! It’s the sun, the wonderful sun that’s going to kill us all!” He yanked the book away from her. He was crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Daisy was about to say; but their grandmother came in just then, hatless, with her hair blowing around her thin, sunburned face.

  “They got the material in,” she said jubilantly. “I bought enough for all the windows.” She spilled out two sacks of red gingham. It billowed out across the table like the northern lights, red over red. “I thought it would never get here.”

  Daisy reached out to touch it.

  She waited for him, sitting at the white-damask table of the dining car. He hesitated at the door, standing framed by the snow of ash behind him, and then came gaily in, singing.

  “Daisy, Daisy, give me your theory do,” he sang. He carried in his arms a bolt of red cloth. It billowed out from the bolt as he handed it to her grandmother—she standing on the chair, transfixed by joy, the pieces of paper, the yellow tape measure fallen from her forever.

  Daisy came and stood in front of him.

  “Daisy, Daisy,” he said gaily “Tell me—”

  She put her hand on his chest. “No theory,” she said. “I know.”

  “Everything, Daisy?” He smiled the easy, lopsided smile, and she thought sadly that even knowing, she would not be able to see him as he was, but only as the boy who had worked at the grocery store, the boy who had known everything.

  “No, but I think I know.” She held her hand firmly against his chest, over the flaming hoop of his breast. “I don’t think we are people anymore. I don’t know what we are—atoms stripped of our electrons maybe, colliding endlessly against each other in the center of the sun while it burns itself to ash in the endless snowstorm at its heart.”

  He gave her no clue. His smile was still confident, easy “What about me, Daisy?” he asked.

  “I think you are my golden bear, my flaming hoop, I think you are Ra, with no end to your name at all, Ra who knows everything.”

  “And who are you?”

  “I am Daisy, who loved the sun.”

  He did not smile, did not change his mocking expression. But his tanned hand closed over hers, still pushing against his chest.

  “What will I be now, an X-ray zigzagging all the way to the surface till I turn into light? Where will you take me after you have taken me? To Saturn, where the sun shines on the cold rings till they melt into happiness? Is that where you shine now, on Saturn? Will you take me there? Or will we stand forever like this, me with my bucket and shovel, squinting up at you?”

  Slowly he gave her hand back to her. “Where do you want to go, Daisy?”

  Her grandmother still stood on the chair, holding the cloth as if it were a benediction. Daisy reached out and touched the cloth, as she had in the moment when the sun went nova. She smiled up at her grandmother. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I’m so glad it’s come.”

  She bent suddenly to the window and pulled the faded curtains aside as if she thought because she knew she might be granted some sort of vision, might see for some small moment the little girl that was herself, with her little girl’s chest and toddler’s stomach; … might see herself as she really was: Daisy, in the sun. But all she could see was the endless snow.

  Her brother was reading on the blue couch in her mother’s living room. She stood over him, watching him read. “I’m afraid now,” Daisy said, but it wasn’t her brothers face that looked back at her.

  All right, then, Daisy thought. None of them are any help. It doesn’t matter. I have come face to face with what I fear and what I love and they are the same thing.

  “All right, then,” Daisy said, and turned back to Ron. “I’d like to go for a ride. With the top down.” She stopped and squinted up at him. “I love the sun,” she said.

  When he put his arm around her shoulder, she did not move away. His hand closed on her breast and he bent down to kiss her.

  I used to write confessions stories with titles like “I Called for Help on My CB … and Got a Rapist Instead.” I have made various pronouncements about this tawdry part of my past, calling the confessions a “quaint apprenticeship” and declaring that “I did them for the money,” but the sordid truth is that I loved writing confessions, and whenever I can get away with it, I still do.

  Mail-Order Clone

  What throwed me off about this guy was the way he looked. I mean, I ain’t no Burt Reynolds, but this guy was just plain ugly And little. He was wearing some of them fancy high-heeled boots, and he still didn’t hardly come up to my armpit. He had on a fancy East Coast suit and one of them little bitty black mustaches that look like they been painted on.

  “Hello,” he says, like I should know who he is.

  “Yeah?”

  He kind of laughs t
o himself, and then he says, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I shake my head, wondering if now they are hiring midgets at Welfare, which would be a switch. Most of those guys are twice as big as me ever since the Mafia took over the department. If he is one of the Welfare guys I am sure as hell not going to let him in. Last time they grabbed a six-pack of Coors and docked our check fifty bucks. They was looking at Marjean’s love magazines, too. Hell, what good is all that money if they won’t let you have no fun with it? Anyway, he can just stand outside till I figure out who he is.

  “Don’t you remember?” he says, still kind of laughing. “Twelve ninety-five postpaid. Delivery guaranteed in three weeks?”

  I was right. They’re on to Marjean’s love books. Only how’d they find out about this deal? “I don’t know nothing,” I says.

  He smiles real wide. “I’m your clone,” he says.

  Well, what do you know? “Marjean,” I calls out, pretty cockylike, “Marjean Ramona, you come on out here. I got something for you to see.”

  She comes sauntering out in her Indian nightgown which don’t have no sides, just strings to hold it together, and which is open in the front just about down to kingdom come. She’s got her hair up in braids, too. That means she’s in one of her Indian moods, prancing around not letting me touch her ’cause she’s got royal Kiowa blood.

  I figure she’ll be pretty mad when I tell her who this guy is, since she was the one who kept saying the ad was a fake, but she don’t act mad at all. She just sort of smiles at the guy and pulls her nightgown together in the front. That don’t do no good. She ends up showing more than ever. She flips them black braids at him and says, real breathy, “Hi. What’s your name?”

  “Marjean,” I says before he can answer. “His name’s the same as mine. He’s my clone.”

  She’s not even listening to me. “Come on in,” she says, and the guy sort of scrapes past her into the house.

  She starts right after him, but I got a hold of her arm. “That’s the clone I sent for that you said was a fake.”

  “I know,” she says in that dreamylike voice. “I wonder what his name is.”

  “I told you, Marjean. Same as mine. He’s just like me.”

  “Maybe,” she says. She licks her lips with her tongue.

  “You gotta be nice to him, Marjean,” I says, wishing she would show some enthusiasm. “Get him one of them beers we got hid outback. And take off that nightgown. We got company.”

  She looks up at me with them big black eyes of hers and says, “Why, that’s just what I had in mind.”

  Now I am not so dumb. Even though Marjean is hiding it pretty good, pretending she likes this guy and all, I can tell she is mad. She was dead sent against my sending for a clone.

  “It’s a fake,” she says.

  “How do you know that? You ain’t even read the ad.”

  “The Kiowa know many things,” she says real mysteriouslike. She pulls that Kiowa stuff whenever she don’t have a good answer. She’s no more Indian than them old hippies out on the edge of town. They got long hair and live in tepees, smoking mushrooms and talking a lot of gibberish, but they ain’t Indians, and the Welfare guys know it. They don’t get no Indian checks and neither does Marjean Ramona. So I don’t put no faith in this Kiowa stuff.

  “They can’t make clones,” Marjean says, “not for twelve ninety-five.”

  “Sure they can. You send in a piece of your hair or a fingernail, something that’s got cells in it. And they put it in a test tube and there you are. One genuine clone.”

  I showed her the story that give me the idea in the first place, seens as how she is so crazy for them stories. “Mail-Order Family,” it was called, all about this poor orphan girl who didn’t have no family till she got a clone and then how they was just like twins and they both married brothers and everything, but it didn’t do no good. She just never wants to send for nothing out of her love magazines. I tried to get her to send for one of them holographic nighties in the Fredericks of Hollywood ad, the ones that promise to show you all sides of the merchandise at once, but she wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t even let me send for a box of lubricated bionic ripples, and they was only a dollar.

  “I don’t care what you say, Marjean,” I says. “I am sending for this clone.”

  “You’re wasting your money,” she says, “and even if you had a clone, what would you do with it? What good is a clone anyway?”

  “What about ‘Mail-Order Family’? What about that, huh? A clone’s good for lots of stuff, Marjean. Lots of stuff.”

  So now I got me a clone and I can tell you it is a good feeling to prove old high-and-mighty Marjean wrong for once. But after about two weeks of this guy, I figured Marjean was right about one thing. Clones may be good for lots of stuff, like I said, but I sure as hell couldn’t figure out what. When I asked him about getting a job, he just laughed. He said if he started working it would be like I started working and I’d be off the Welfare rolls like a shot. I figured at least he could go cash my check seens as how we both had the same signature and all. He seemed real willing, especially after he seen how big the check was. But then Marjean real fastlike grabs up both checks and says she wants to go. “You have to cash them at the post office,” she says to him real seriouslike, and he turns kind of green. After that I can’t hardly even get him to go get us Coors at the Indian camp.

  All he wanted to do was set at the kitchen table, talking to Marjean in her nightgown and eating and drinking up every damn thing in the house through that froggy mustache of his. He still didn’t look nothing like me. I spent about an hour looking in the mirror trying to imagine what I’d look like with one of them little black mustaches, but it didn’t do no good. Marjean come and stood behind me. “I can see a big resemblance,” she said, smiling sort of slylike, and sauntered off to the bedroom.

  “Well, I sure as hell can’t.” I said that pretty loud and I guess my clone heard me, ’cause he come and put his arm around me, pal-like, and says, “The lack of resemblance perplexes you, doesn’t it?”

  “Huh?”

  “That we look so different. Clones are identical. That’s what you’ve always heard, isn’t it?”

  That made me feel sort of ashamed. The poor guy can’t help it he’s so little and scrawny. But he didn’t act upset. He just kind of laughed and motioned to me to set down at the table. Then he pulled out a pen and a piece of paper. I see the paper is one of them copy sheets and on it is the very same ad I sent in. Right there is my own name and address I wrote myself. This made me even more ashamed. To tell the truth, once or twice I have started to think things are not quite on the up-and-up, if you know what I mean.

  He flipped the ad over and started drawing and talking real fast, a whole bunch of stuff about cells and chromosomes. I listened real hard, but it didn’t make much sense. Just a bunch of lines and squiggles.

  Then he pulls out a quarter and holds it up in front of me. “What do you see?” he says.

  “A quarter.”

  “No. I mean, what do you see on the quarter?”

  There’s some little words and a guy that looks kind of like Nixon only his hair is in a ponytail. “Some president,” I say, figuring I am safe that way.

  He turns it over. “Now what do you see?”

  I recognize this one right off. “A bird,” I say.

  “George Washington,” he says, and flips the quarter over. “An American eagle.” Boy, am I glad I didn’t go with Nixon. “They’re nothing alike, are they?”

  I am getting pretty nervous with all these questions. “No,” I say, only kind of hesitantlike.

  “Oh, but they are. They’re two different sides of a quarter. Just as you and I are two different sides of a person.” He flips the quarter over again. The bird is still there.

  Well, that made a whole lot more sense than them squiggly chromosomes. I felt real relieved. I was going to ask him about the job thing again while he was in an explaining mood, but just
then Marjean come out dressed up fit to kill and said they was going over to the Indian camp, so I didn’t get to.

  They was gone a long time. I did the quarter thing a couple more times, and it always worked, so I figured he must be telling the truth. Long about four I went out on the porch where I could see them coming. Not that I was worried or anything. We were two sides of a quarter, he said, and if you can’t trust your flip side, you are in pretty bad shape.

  They wasn’t coming yet, but what was scared the pants off me. These two big government cars pulled up in front of the house and four guys got out and come over to the porch. Four guys! Welfare has never sent four before. They only do that when they’re gonna beat the hell out of you for violations.

  They already seen me so there was no use pretending nobody was home, and anyway they were wearing suits and didn’t look nearly as big as the Welfare guys usually look, so I stayed on the porch. But I kept a sharp eye peeled for Marjean and my clone. I sure as hell wished they would get home.

  Two of the guys stand back with their arms folded and the other two come up on the porch. One of them hands me a piece of paper and says, “Have you seen this ad before?”

  Well, hell, it’s that ad my clone had the copy of scribbling on not two hours ago. It is probably still setting there on the kitchen table. Anyway there is my name and address in my own writing, which is on file down at Welfare. They have got me dead to rights. “Marjean made me send for it,” I says, “but she didn’t know it was against the rules. It ain’t listed in the Welfare book. Honest. Anyway, she don’t read too good.”

  The two guys in the back whisper to the other two and the two on the porch reach into their pockets. I practically have a heart attack before I see it’s just little cards they’re reaching for. They hold them out to me. “United States Post Office,” one of them says. “Mail fraud division. Did you send for the clone advertised in this ad?”

  I read the card to make sure, but I knew they wasn’t Welfare guys all along. “Sure,” I says, “I sent for one of them clones.”